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Daniel Kinzler wrote:
You should probably fake your own user agent? Something like commonsapi/1.0
I'm only faking it because with the default agent (whatever it is for PHP), requests often don't work on Mediawiki sites. Not sure what would happen if I make my own...
It will work. Actually, it's semi-officially requested/recommended that you use your own descriptive user agent string, including some means to learn more about the tool and/or contact you -- or selectively block it if things go wrong. And it does work, I use it for my own stuff.
General request to ALL bot and script makers, for any purpose: Please DO NOT FAKE UA STRINGS! Please set your own, descriptive ones! This is a question of good netizenship (as in "follow the spec" and "be cooperative").
Basically, if we catch you faking a browser UA we will block you without mercy. :)
Default UAs for various standard libraries are unfortunately blocked due to past abuse. We strongly recommend using a specific user-agent string which includes your software's name and some sort of contact information... a URL or email address helps... so that problematic bots can be tracked down and the problem worked out.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)